Rolling Stone, 3/24/94
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THE DEVIL INSIDE
For Danzig--the man and the band--that old black magic isn't just a
sales gimmick. By David Wild
"No trick or treaters came to my house for Halloween," says Glenn
Danzig with a dark laugh as he points to a bowl of stale candy on a coffee
table in his living room. "For some reason, people around here are scared
of me."
It isn't too hard to figure out why the kids in this recently
earthquake-ravaged neighborhood in Hollywood might be wary of knocking
on Danzig's front door. To them, he must seem like some pumped-up Boo
Radley in a post-punk update of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Or TO DISMEMBER A
MOCKINGBIRD, perhaps. First, there's Danzig's home, a wonderfully Gothic,
vine-covered 1905 Craftsman house complete with spooky stained-glass
windows. The place suggests that for the resident within, it's Halloween
all year round. Then there's the intimidating, black-clad Danzig himself.
Handsome and muscle-bound (although surprisingly short in stature), he
looks like Conan the Rock Star. "Glenn's got a certain animal magnetism
to him," says Danzig bassist, Eerie Von. "Especially the animal part."
For more than 15 of his 34 years, Danzig has flexed plenty of musical
muscle, mostly on the darker sides of rock--first in the late '70s and
early '80s as the singer and leader of the Misfits, a now legendary but
then--under- appreciated New York City horror-punk outfit; later with the
more experimental Samhain; and since 1988 with the band that bears his
surname. Armed with hardcore zeal and serious chops, the musically
ambitious group has covered a sonic terrain somewhere between Black
Sabbath and Howlin' Wolf while building a rabid cult following.
Now with "Mother," Danzig--the man and the band--are enjoying a blast
of pop success. "This band finally stayed together long enough for everyone
to catch up with what we're doing," says Danzig. The group's breakthrough
song is actually a new live version of a track from Danzig's 1988 debut
album, and the video has propelled the group--singer/ songwriter Danzig,
bassist Von, drummer Chuck Biscuits and guitarist John Christ--into MTV's
Buzz Bin.
Now all hell's breaking loose. The band's first album recently went
gold and the 1993 THRALL-DEMONSWEATLIVE EP (featuring the live "Mother")
has crashed into the Top 100; it sold nearly 100,000 copies duing one
recent 10-day period. But this is no heavy-metal sellout.
From the Misfits' "Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight" to Samhain's
"All Murder, All Guts, All Fun" to Danzig's "How The Gods Kill," Glenn
Danzig has never made music for the faint of heart. For better or worse,
Danzig means what he sings.
"Glenn's vision is very dark, apocalyptic and beautiful in its own way,"
says Rick Rubin, president of the band's label, American Recordings, and a
longtime Danzig producer and booster. "But that's how he really sees the
world. He's a brutally honest guy."
A few days after the Los Angeles earthquake, an amiable but intense
Danzig welcomes a visitor into his home, where Danzig has been both
cleaning up and packing up. Though stuctural damage to his house appears
minor, the brick porch columns have crumbled, as has his chimney, and there
are cracks everywhere. "I was moving anyway," says Danzig, who came west
four and half years ago. "This just makes it more important for me to
actually do it. I'm thinking of Nevada or Virginia. Somewhere else."
The shades are all drawn as the tattooed Danzig, who's wearing a T-shirt
that says UNDERTAKER, pulls up a chair to talk. One of his cats--black of
course--settles in nearby. The decor inside Chez Danzig is Addams Family
meets Pop Culture 101: stuffed wolves, bookshelves full of titles like
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EVIL and CEREMONIAL MAGIC alongside BEAUTY AND THE
BEAST figurines and an unopened box of Count Chocula cereal. As he answers
questions, he reaches for a pair of wooden sticks. Asked what these sticks
are used for, Danzig--a martial artist who trains with one of Bruce Lee's
core students--matter-of-factly replies, "Killing people."
This is a tough guy, after all, who, when he recently met Johnny Cash--
for whom he has written a new song called "13"--told the original man in
black, "Believe me, I don't like many people, but I like you."
Danzig confesses that he is amused to find himself embraced by MTV,
getting serious play for "Mother" as well as repeated thumbs-up from Beavis
and Butt-head. "It's a sign of the times," according to Danzig. "Supposedly
we always had some fans there, but there were other people there who were
scared shitless of us and what we represented." For instance, MTV failed
to jump on the video for the original 1988 DANZIG version of "Mother," in
which a chicken appears to be sacrificed over a bikinied babe. "They had a
total heart attack," Danzig recalls with a laugh.
A cartoon and comic fan himself, Danzig has no problem with his new
animated friends at MTV. "I know kids like Beavis and Butt-head," says
Danzig. "Sometimes I was like Beavis and Butt-head growing up. I know
people who lit their friend's house on fire accidentally." So when Danzig
looks out into his crowds, does he see real-life Beavis and Butt-heads out
there? "Always," says Danzig. "Since I've been playing music."
That's been a long time now. Growing up in Lodi, N.J., Danzig heard his
father listening to Elvis Presley and his older brother crank up Blue Cheer.
Danzig played in a few bands before becoming frontman for the Misfits, a
punk band now considered seminal, then totally broke.
Danzig isn't especially interested in talking about the Misfits, but he
does recall with a smile that they once opened for Patti Smith--a literary
hero for him along with Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Charles
Bukowski--and that even she was bit put off by the band.
In the end, Danzig felt frustrated by the limitations of his band mates
in the Misfits and moved on. "When I started Samhain, I remember a producer
telling me that I was in a real band now," he says. "And that was a step in
the direction of taking the music a little more seriously, this is what I
want to do with my life, so let's do it."
It was on the advice of then-Metallica bassist Cliff Burton that Rick
Rubin went to check out Samhain at a New Music Seminar gig in 1986. Rubin
came away a major Glenn Danzig fan. "He was this really great
singer/songwriter with a history of surrounding himself with people who
were incompetent," says Rubin. Keeping Eerie Von from Samhain, Danzig
signed on his dream drummer, Biscuits (famed in underground circles for
work with D.O.A., Black Flag and Circle Jerks), and a formally trained
guitarist whom the other band members dubbed John Christ. Front and center
was Danzig, a gifted singer whose vocal prowess has led to comparisons to,
among others, Presley, Jim Morrison and Roy Orbison (for whom Danzig wrote
"Life Fades Away" for the LESS THAN ZERO soundtrack).
In search of creative freedom, the band signed on with Rubin. The band
members hadn't even played live together before cutting their 1988
Rubin-produced debut DANZIG, but there was plenty of time to get tight as
they toured to support that album as well as 1990's DANZIG II--LUCIFUGE
and 1992's DANZIG III--HOW THE GODS KILL. "When the first album came out,
we were called a metal band, a thrash band, a speed-metal band, a
death-metal band," recalls Danzig. "Nobody knew what we were." Thanks
to "Mother," Danzig's bound to see lots of new faces in the crowd when
the band hits the road this summer in support of the soon to be recorded
DANZIG IV.
And what does Danzig think of naysayers who write him off as some
juiced-up, devil-worshipping metal guy? "It all goes back to the fact
that you can never underestimate the stupidity of the average person,"
he says. "People don't want to get past that stuff, because that means
they're going to have to think."
Like that moment in the 1990 long-form "Danzig" video in which Danzig
gives a tour of his home library and pulls out a book called THE OCCULT
ROOTS OF NAZISM and says, "Every schoolchild should have this book. You
can learn a lot from this one"?
"It was sarcastic," Danzig says, then adds, "Well, you can learn from
it. Obviously, if a book is published, it's got knowledge in it. If you
let your bias get in the way, you don't know about it. If I was a Nazi
hunter, I'd want to read this book." According to him, "If someone says
it's politically incorrect to have that book, I basically say, 'Fuck you.'
If you're going to tell me what book to read or not to read, who's the
fascist?"
Politically, Danzig is no lightweight lefty. "I'm totally fed up with
this country," he says. "They spew bullshit down your throat every day on
TV." He speaks passionately about "press blackouts" and a file that he
alleges the government keeps on his band. In the end, though, what makes
Danzig interesting isn't his physique or politics but that he's fought
his way to the top on his own strange terms.
Danzig drums a bit on the living-room coffee table with his Filipino
killing sticks, then says: "I've been doing this a long time. And it gets
to the point where you say, 'Fuck everybody.' When you've been doing it so
long, it comes time when you decide, if I ain't doing it my way, I'm not
going to do it."